Monday, July 3, 2017

While multinationals have stabilised in
India, and recruitment portals are replete with the statistics of employment,
we have to look at the various spaces people occupy mentally, while serving the
nation.

Ideologies tincture our worlds. We presume
that right wing ideologies are totalitarian, but then, so were left wing ones.
And those who were fence sitters, representing the right to remain neutral,
were generally vacuous. When India won it’s Freedom, from the British, the
Gandhi Nehru leadership had it’s moments of extreme tension, since mutual
dialogue was not always possible. Industrialisation and Nehru’s “new temples of
India”, have always communicatedthat
the Nation knows best. As a result rural people are always buttressed between
the world they have known, and the rights to tradition, which they hold so
sacred, and the sensibilities of the elite, who mark them as backward, ignorant
and superstitious. Worse, they often play on these sentiments in a bid to bring
them to their side of the fence.

A former Naxalfrom St Stephen’s College, once said that
they had to leave the villages because the villagers could no longer feed
them.The daughter of a famousBJP politician said that actually they were
like everyone else, but for reasons of political gain, they played the Hindutva
card. “Like everyone else” in the late seventies, when the Jan Sangh flags were
beginning to flutter in places like Ashram and Lajpat Nagar, in New Delhi,
meant “modern, anglophile and looking towards America as the site of popular
cultural consumption.”

It is not surprising,then, that forms of socialisation make us
perceive agriculture as something that industrialisation should promote,
trampling the interests of the farmer with small holdings, underground. That
two and half acres is the national average for producing bumber crops is
something Indians should beproud of.
However,that industrial elites look to
colonising everything is a self evident fact. The joint stock companies, sociologists
argued in the1960s, created a buffer
between bourgeoisie and proletariat. That was when the factory was the mode of
organising, and joint investments integrated a rising middle class into the
profits to be made by investing in companies. Today, however, as the
Sociologist Daniel Bell foresaw, it is the laboratory that predominates, and
since secrecy and surveillance are its bywords, the oligarchy of scientists
excludes the common masses from decision making, and ‘fear and trembling’ are
the natural consequences.

Socialism, co-operatives, unions all become
redundant in these new economies. Political organisation in these new States
disclose that federation is irrelevant when it comes to the colonisation of
rivers, mountains, fertile lands, deserts, even the sea. The commons are
considered to be the right of exploitation by contract to private parties, for
enhancement of industrial goals. Tribals and peasants are rendered even more
marginal. Craft communities are deprived of their natural skills, as their
poverty forces them into manual labour for construction.Since they are dehumanised, they are merely
paid minimum wages and left to their skills as a lumpen proletariat to survive
in the midst of real problems such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, and
decrepitude in old age. Caste comes in as a useful explanation for their
condition, as everything is blamed on their previous life. Consensus about
religious participation between upper castes and lower castes leads to euphoric
states during ritual events. Merchants and workers combine to engage in
participation where the presence of Gods and Goddesses further elaborates this
forced servitude upon thelower castes.
The depletion in the numbers of theworking class members enrolled in Unions is only too apparent.

Socialism by itself, without it’s self
regulating mechanisms leads to tremendous inefficiency. Theindustrial barons, as debtors to
Nationalised Banks, clearly represent the way in which the bourgeoisie are able
to thwart the codes of modern banking and send the entire nation into paroxysms
as we saw in the winter of 2016. Earlier recessions had not disturbed the
Indian economy because of the resilience of post box economies which nestled in
the Post Office, and ofcourse keeping money under the bed, and in cupboard by
housewives who always managed to stow away savings for a rainy day.The mountains of cash which surfaced are
still to be recycled, after being shredded, to make notebooks for government
school children.

The second example of Socialism without
legitimation is ofcourse Air India.There is a category known as tickets for
LTC, which charges more than the sum routinely charged by Airlines companies
for air tickets, by several thousands. If the government employees do not book
through a company called Laurie and Balmer (some relic mnemonic from the past)
the tickets are not refunded by the government. So this is a form of
corruption, as the government siphons money from one account to uphold another.

South India has had a long tradition of
thinking about school education. The network of schools which has taught
village children, and provided a wholistic sense of being, has continued to
proliferate. The Right To Education Act of 2009, while being an immensely
important measure to provide democratic and free education, did have certain
rules about the kind of books, paraphernalia and certified teachers employed.
Schools run by voluntary organisations for tribal children and rural children,
including dalits, quite often could not meet these requirements. As a result,
the children passed their examination through Open School, which then became a
boon for those who wanted to enter the professional world.

Rural schools run by NGOs often attempt to
provide a wholistic education, which is quite different from the mainline
schools which promote rote learning, competitive attitudes, and disciplinarian
methods. In these schools, the teachers are often trained previously in
Theosophical Society, Waldorf (Rudolph Steiner) or J Krishnamurthi Foundations.
They come to their tasks with a certain enthusiasm, discipline and commitment.
Ideologically, they are infused with the idea that ecology, sensitivity to
environment, sustenance,mother
tongueeducation,learning of art and
crafts, and knowledge attained through conversation, formal interaction, play,
experiment, and freedom are immensely important. This frees the child’s
imagination, allows him/her a non-hierarchical relationship with teachers and
guides, and most importantly releases the innate ability that human beings
have, to ask questions.

Art and Theatre, music and photography as
skills allow children to understand that uniqueness is as important as
collective efforts. Whether it is jewellery making, production of art work such
as maps for Geography and History, or simply understanding horticulture and
irrigation through practical techniques, the child is given free space. It is
often argued that thisnurturing of
individualism, integrated with team work, is possible only in schools with
small numbers. Yet,the idea could have
been made to work withurban
neighbourhood schools, with adjoining parks.

Children crumble under continuous
surveillance and testing systems. Parents know that every child has needs which
are to be recognised by the teacher. Mainline schooling promotes the idea of
the talented child versus the mediocre child, which is painful for both parents
and students. The new policy of having Board Exams in Primary and Lower Level
Secondary School is a frightening turn of events. Children will be put to the
hardships of public exams much before they have even developed their
personality. They will be forced to cram, and even if they are successful,their attitude towards the world in general
will be marked by fear and/ or aggrandisement.

Since they experience climate change,
economic recession brought about by instability in crop production, empty wells
and irrigation tanks, young people already fear the future. Their sense of well
being is accosted daily by the news of murder, rape, drunkenness, wilful
violence, suicide, normlessness…the list is endless. To be inured to their
vulnerability as young children facing a rapidly changing world, and to impose
the hardship of Board Exams at such a young age is an act of pedagogic cruelty.
Children are optimistic, they accept that adults control their fate.The severe load of school books injuring
their spines was noticed by Society, and the regulation of books taken to
school everyday came into force.

When young people first come to college,
they are so stultified by the Board exams, that first year B.A syllabus is
presented as a simple entry point into the discipline. This allows them to
enjoy being at University, make friends, learn a new technical language, and
also participate in college activities like sports, theatre and politics. Now,
Universities are also being targeted by the State, so that with Budget cuts in
Education, Privatisation of University Education is putting it outfar out of reach. RTE presumed that by making
school education compulsory, all children would have access tobasic human rights, citizenship beingan array of obligations and privileges. By
crushing young people with formal examinations, the path to equity is blurred.

Alternative School educationists understand
that not all children can accept the pressures of knowledge production. They
are given multiple skills, including weaving, farming, animal husbandry, technical
skills, silk work rearing, carpentry and so on. These are not seen to be lesser
attributes, rather, the child is encouraged to understand that the tactile
world, as much as the cereberal world is defined by his/her involvement in it.

In Kerala, a house wife’s revolution,
supported by the State and Scientists has meant that every woman believes that
she can grow organic vegetables to feed her family. This has been immensely
successful in Ernakulam, Aluva, Kasargod, Ponnapra, Trivandrum, the epicentre being
Palakkad. Many alternative schools in Tamil Nadu and Kerala seriously believe
that children can be socialised to think about garbage recycling and food
production.